Friday, January 25, 2013

Lab 2

1.  Beverly Hills Quadrangle

2.  Northwest: Canoga Park
     North: Van Nuys
     Northeast: Burbank
     West: Topanga
     East: Hollywood
     South: Venice
     Southeast: Inglewood

3.  Topography first compiled in 1966.

4.  North American Datum 1927

5.  1:24000

6.
    a) 5cm*24000 = 120000cm = 1200m
    b) 5*24000 = 120000
        120000 in = 10000 ft = 1.89394 miles
    c) one mile = 5280 ft = 63360 in
         63360 in/24000 = 2.64 inches
    d) 3 km = 3000 m = 300000 cm
        300000cm/24000 = 12.5 cm

7. 20 feet

8.
    a) 34° 4' 28.3188" N, 118° 26' 21.1956" W ; (34.074533,-118.439221)
    b) 34° 0' 27.2232" N, 118° 29' 59.0526" W ; (34.007562,-118.499737)
    c) 34° 7' 12.4284" N, 118° 24' 36.9282" W ; (34.120119,-118.410258)

9.
   a) 177m or 580.709 ft
   b) 42.672m or 140 ft
   c) 194m or 636.483 ft

10. zone 11

11. Northing : 3763000, Easting: 362000

12. 1000000 square meters

13.


14. 14 degrees east

15. The steam flows south because the elevation decreases that way.

16.




Friday, January 18, 2013

Lab 1


                                         (https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=469716398919)

This map is a visualization of the friendship between 500 million users of Facebook, created by Paul Butler, an intern on Facebook's data infrastructure engineering team. To create this visualization, Butler assigned a weight for each pair of major cities in the world based on the distance and number of friendships between the cities. Lines are then plotted between each pair of cities. The visibility of each line is based on the weight of its corresponding pair of cities, such that the cities with more friendships between them would be connected by a brighter line. What strikes me the most about this map is that one can clearly see the outlines of major continents as well as political borders when this map is not based on any additional geographical or political data. The lines also seem to reflect popular flight patterns of air planes. This suggests that most friendship are established locally while some via travel .


                                             (http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view.php?id=55167)

This image is a satellite photo taken by NASA showing Earth's city lights at night. Through this photo we can see an emerging pattern of urbanization such that cities develop from coastlines, water sources such as rivers, and major routes of transportation and trade. While it's no surprise to see blackouts in North Korea, Africa, Russia, and areas of China, I am surprised to see the majority of Canada covered in darkness. I've never been to Canada and have always pictured Canada to be as developed and urbanized as the United States. This assumption, however, has been completely refuted by this photo.




                    (http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2010/11/cartography)

This image, titled "The True Size of Africa," was originally created by Kai Krause and published on The Economist. Most maps nowadays utilize the Mercator Projection, which maintains the shapes and areas of small lands but greatly distorts those of large lands far from the equator. Krause urged that under the influence of the popular Mercator Projection people nowadays have become geographically illiterate. In his image, Krause arranges countries from the Mercator Projection to fit an outline of Africa that has been enlarged to match its actual area. The result is quite shocking; Africa's area is larger than China, America, India, and Europe combined. It really took me a while to believe this image since I've always pictured Africa to be about the same size as South America. Only after seeing this picture did I realize that I am part of the population of "immappancy," or those without sufficient geographical knowledge.